


Right Hand and Joy

by lalaietha



Category: Belgariad/Malloreon Series - David & Leigh Eddings
Genre: Childbirth, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-04
Updated: 2012-02-04
Packaged: 2017-10-30 13:50:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/332428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There is a bed, cushions, sheets, garments, warmth, water, food; the physician, her helpers, solicitude, the constant murmur of voices telling Taiba that she is fine, that everything is normal, that she is doing well."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Right Hand and Joy

**Author's Note:**

> Preceded by [gratia gratium parit](http://archiveofourown.org/works/194900) and by the short [Refuge](http://archiveofourown.org/works/209644).

The first time she'd given birth, it had been in a tiny niche in the wall of the caves that made up the slave pens, with Old Marje making mostly-useless sounds and offering snatches of advice, and Old Marje's grandson (or so she said he was) sitting between them and the rest of the slaves, glowering and frowning and warning them off with inarticulate barks that showed his tongueless mouth behind his teeth. She had cried and bit her tongue on screams; she had bled into the dirt of the floor, and Old Marje cut both birth-cords with a rock the guards didn't know she had before she put two tiny shapes on Taiba's breast, both of them still slick with blood and whatever else there was.

And those babies died.

Pregnancy brings back those memories. As her belly swells (more than then, because now she has enough to eat), the sounds of the caves echo in her ears and sometimes she can taste them at the back of her throat. Sometimes she wakes up crying out because she thought she was back there, back in Rak Cthol, in the dark and the stink and all alone again; it's like the wail comes through even the weight of sleep and she wakes herself with it. 

Relg always knows. Maybe she told him once, half asleep, or maybe he guessed, but he knows. Most of the time he wakes her, or is already gathering her up before she's really free of sleep, so that she can bury her face in his shoulder and listen to him murmur to her in Ulgo, in a language that has never been near those pens, and never will. 

Other times she wakes up crying, pillow wet with it, silent. She never remembers, but she knows she's dreaming of the babies dead, the daughters unnamed and lost.

The first time she gave birth is like a net in her head, and for a while everything reminds her and sends her back to tangle in it.

 

The second time, there are caves again - but these are clean and open. The soft light of the glow-paste is familiar and spills from bowls like water on nearly every surface, and for Taiba there are three candles. These caves are home - if not hers, not forever (there is that pull, gentle and patient, but persistent and ever-present, towards a land she also dreams of now, and a God's voice softly singing songs of welcome and love), then at least someone's: always someones. The lives of Ulgo back before the cracking of the world are in this place, first above and then below it. They sing, and the distant sound of that song is everywhere, endlessly echoing love to a God and father of Gods.

There is a bed, cushions, sheets, garments, warmth, water, food; the physician, her helpers, solicitude, the constant murmur of voices telling Taiba that she is fine, that everything is normal, that she is doing well.

Caught between the (expected, familiar) pain of the contractions and the slight gnawing edge of panic at memories that threatened to drown her, Taiba can't find much to answer them, much less find a way to shape it in her husband's language, still strange and accented in her mouth. It's hard enough to remember how to understand it. But even the voices are familiar and soft in a way Old Martje's never could be.

The second time she gives birth there is all this and, more importantly, there is her husband. Relg, almost a father. Relg, who you would never think would know these things, would know how to soothe, to rub at her back and let her fingers dig into his, into the back of his hand, how to help. You'd never think it, except Ulgo men were taught these things, because it was only suitable that they be there - _there_ , right there - when their children are born.

(And the light, gentle touch that is always inside her mind approves, Mara approves, because this was also how his people - how _Taiba_ 's people, and oh such a strange thought - did this, that a father should be there to see the honour done for him in being the one to sire a child - )

The physician's voice, the voices of her assistants, they become just so much noise; Relg's voice makes sense, moving easily in and out of Ulgo and the common speech and a word here or two of the Old Tongue. Telling her what the physician say, telling her that she is strong, and safe, and the end is coming soon, and sometimes just telling stories, snatches of parables and passages out of the book of UL that she recognizes. 

And then, finally, holding her (her hands on his shoulders, his arms helping to bear her weight, his face somehow unperturbed by her crying out) when the baby, when _their_ baby, finishes thinking about coming out into the world and finally does. 

A single thin wail braids itself with two others, the sisters he will never know.

Relg catches her when she sags, when the afterbirth passes. The physician has the baby and he is crying; Taiba reaches out for him while Relg helps her back to the bed, to lie down, because she still can't remember Ulgo. 

Relg takes their baby from the physician (the baby's face cleaned, and wrapped in a cloth Taiba had carefully made, with her sister-in-law's help); with a gesture that Taiba knows is old, as old as these caves, Relg makes a mark with his thumb on their son's forehead, and then kisses where he made it, before he gives their son to her.

He is tiny and red, fragile and limp in the way babies are; he smells of blood and other things, and the same way all babies smell. Taiba finds she can't stop crying. Her son will have sisters and brothers afterwards (she knows, knows beyond knowing), but he already has two sisters, long gone, who didn't even have names.

But he is hers, and Relg's, and nothing can take him, and that was why she cries, because she is too tired not to, and the thought was so vast and great.


End file.
